Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
I’m at my daughter’s last regular season volleyball game. I’m blogging and taking photos with my iPhone, shooting video with my Flip and will be Tweeting with iPhone via Twitterific.
Here’s a photo of Bekah during warm-ups.
This is why I’m heading to North Carolina tomorrow instead of going today. Don’t want to miss Bekah’s last game.
If you are a SMUGgle and haven’t started your own blog yet, that’s the purpose of this post.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQBHVaDHgIc]
I also wanted use this video to introduce you to one of SMUG’s major benefactors, for whom our SMUG North Annex — the Lewis J. and LaVonne A. Aase Motor Fleet and Retreat Center — is named. Here’s a photo of Dad and Mom in front of the facility that bears their name:
And here’s the “retreat center” portion of the facility:
If you’d like to see more campus photos, check out the SMUG Facebook group.
Dad and his cohort will be taking blogging classes in the Retreat Center next Saturday. As I help them get started, I’ll also use that process as a teaching/learning opportunity for SMUGgles, showing their step-by-step progress.
Meanwhile, you can click here to get started on your own blogging journey.
Earlier this year I got a chance to meet Chuck Hester when we presented together at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit in San Francisco. Chuck’s story is about using LinkedIn for power networking, and he’s organized what he calls LinkedIn Live events to turn his local virtual network into a face-to-face networking opportunity.
I hope to see Chuck again this week at the Ragan Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World conference at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC. I’m unfortunately going to be traveling during his presentation, but will plan to connect with him later in the conference.
Chuck is turning his experience with LinkedIn into a new book that will be released later this year. It’s called Linking In to Pay it Forward: Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media. You can read about it on Chuck’s Pay it Forward blog. So when Chuck asked me for the “Small Good” of giving his book a shout out, I was glad to help.
One of the things I appreciate about the social media world is the “pay it forward” philosophy. Much of what I’m doing with SMUG is experimenting publicly with different tools and techniques. Then, after I’ve worked out the kinks and gotten hands-on experience with the tools, I can confidently recommend the best ways to use them in my work environment. And I figure if I can help others by letting them learn from my experimentation, that’s a worthwhile service.
But I can’t experiment with everything; I personally haven’t used LinkedIn nearly as much as Facebook. So if Chuck would like to write a guest post with some highlights from his new book, I’d be happy to confer Associate Professor status and make him a SMUG faculty member.
Today I had the pleasure of participating in a Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival, as part of our Public Affairs/Media Support Services booth.
We had about 700 high school students from across southern Minnesota attending the day-long event, where they got to participate in some classes and also meet people who work for Mayo Clinic in various capacities.
This is a great application for a Facebook group. In our booth, we had eight laptops connected to the Web and with the Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival Alumni group set as a “Favorite.” Students could log in to their Facebook and join the group, so they can go back and see the photos and videos we’ve uploaded, including photos of them. (Note: we obtained parent permission and had release forms signed for students to participate.)
Here’s one of those photos that shows our booth:
We’ve uploaded photos and videos from the day to the group, and the students will be able to go back to it and tag themselves, or otherwise interact with each other and with Mayo staff. It also will provide our Human Resources and Education colleagues an opportunity to share updates on internships or course offerings with students who have expressed interest by attending.
As of this writing we have 335 members in the group. Some of them are Mayo staff, but most are students. We also have 7 videos and 136 photos.
If you have any kind of event that involves primarily high school or college students, you definitely could use a group like this to engage participants and to stay in contact with them.
Choose a platform participants are already using. For high school students, Facebook is it. If you have to get people to join the networking site and then join your group, you’ve created a two-step process that’s too complicated. At our event today it took less than a minute for students to join the group.
Have a way for participants to sign up while they’re in your booth. Having the laptops with Internet access right there, so all they had to do was sign in to Facebook and join the group, made it easy. I guarantee that if we would have given them a flyer with the URL we wouldn’t have had 10 percent join the group. As it was, we had about 300 sign up in the first few hours.
Give them a reason to return. For today, having the photos and videos of them (and links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites like our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel, News Blog and Facebook Fan Page was novelty enough. Hopefully they’ll go back to the group when they’re at home, and will tag themselves in photos and videos and will invite friends to join the group. It will be up to our HR team that sponsored the event to continue to make the group interesting and relevant to the students in the longer term.
I’ve previously written about Yammer and how I think it has some neat potential applications. I’m actually writing this post to show some work colleagues how to get started with Yammer and how it could practically help in
Here’s a slideshow that takes you through the process, step-by-step, of joining (or creating) your company’s Yammer network.
I had originally planned for this to include a narration track (as you see in this video I shot in the SMUG Annex last night), but I think the slides themselves are fairly self-explanatory.
As we get into some of the subsequent courses in the Yammer curriculum, there will definitely be a place for screencasts and slidescasts. But for now, here are your…
Thanks to my colleague, Bob Nellis, for serving as the guinea pig and allowing me to capture screen shots of his sign-up process.
